A database farm comprises all the database servers, instances of various platforms, and versions used in an enterprise to support its day-to-day business operations or functions.
As a DBA managing a large database farm, one of the most important things is to have a complete overview of your database farm.
You should be able to answer questions such as:
- What is the health status of all databases/instances? Which databases need attention right now, and which should I prioritize?
- How many disk, memory, and CPU cores have been allocated to the database farm?
- What is the resource utilization for each instance?
- How many instances exist in my database farm?
- What are the database platforms and versions running in the database farm?
Virtualized environments, resource allocation, and utilization are the issues. You should carefully analyze all the resources allocated in your database farm; you should have a clear overview of how the various resources like your disk, memory, and CPU are utilized in your database farm. You must determine if your servers have been over or under-provisioned with resources. You should strive to allocate resources across the farm and VMs to maximize utilization and performance.
Documenting a large database farm is also a demanding issue as your database farm expands. With proper documentation, you have up-to-date information on your databases in the database farm. It makes maintenance easier, helps the management or DBA’s decision-making and diminishes risks. It is more straightforward to make an assessment or plan ahead using your database documentation as a guide.
When you manage a database farm, you rarely have the time to create let alone maintain complete documentation of all resources in your farm. It would be best if you had tools to automate the documentation process.
In your database farm, you need to ensure that all your backup jobs are running optimally and running as scheduled. You need to have complete control over your databases’ backup and recovery plan; it is essential if an unexpected situation like corrupted databases, sudden server failure, or other forms of data loss occur. You will use existing backups to restore lost information to the system.
Imagine – having a database farm with hundreds or even thousands of instances. Do you still have enough time to remote connect to each database server to know its health status?
dbWatch Control Center helps users with their capacity and resource planning projects. It features built-in views that display the capacity overview like your database resource consumption in the database farm.
This overview provides DBAs and managers with information to determine which instances consume the most or least memory resource in the database farm. It gives you clear information on which instances have excess resources allocated to them, which you can reallocate to instances that have more need for them.
For example, this view displays the total disk usage in the database farm for you to determine which instances have the most amount of disks or volumes allocated. It also shows the usage rate per volume.
It’s a complete database farm monitoring and management solution, which offers automation, consolidated views, and performance reports giving you the key information you need at your fingertips. Automating your routine tasks helps you save time and effort on manually managing databases on your farm by focusing on more critical tasks at hand. At the same time, dbWatch Control Center does all the proactive monitoring of your database farm, allowing you to have complete control over your database farm.
dbWatch Control Center offers the following:
- Farm overview – consolidated views for performance, capacity, and maintenance for your entire database farm
- Monitor in-depth all your instances and platforms
- Performance – identify performance bottlenecks within the farm
- Scalability – ability to adapt to your growing database farm
- Alerting – alerting and third-party extensions tailored to your business requirements
- Security – role-based access controls, Kerberos integration encrypts connections and support security certificates
Summary
With dbWatch Control Center as your partner in monitoring and managing your database farm you achieve the following:
- Proactive monitoring displays a health overview of all databases in your database farm. It provides you with the necessary information for you to act against possible issues.
- Provides complete information on your database farms’ total allocated hardware and resource utilization like your CPU, memory, and disk usage.
- Displays information on all instances in the database farm.
- Auto-discover instances on specified network ranges.
- Delivers information for performance metrics and identifies which database platforms and versions are running in your database farm.
Discover Control Center today, download a trial version of dbWatch that monitors up to 5 instances for 6 months.
